60 Fun Facts About Vegan

In what year was the word 'vegan' coined?

Donald and Dorothy Watson coined it while setting up a newsletter in Leicester, England, for members who also shunned dairy and eggs.

The word 'vegan' was built from the first three and last two letters of which word?

Its inventor said it marked the beginning and end of vegetarianism, the point the movement should logically arrive at.

Who coined the word 'vegan'?

He was a woodwork teacher who set up the first vegan newsletter with the schoolteacher he later married.

World Vegan Day is celebrated on which date each year?

The date marks the founding of the Vegan Society in November 1944; November as a whole is often promoted as World Vegan Month.

Which famous playwright wrote to the first issue of The Vegan News in 1944?

Shaw had been a vegetarian since the 1880s and lived to 94, which he liked to attribute to his diet.

The Society's founding quarterly newsletter, launched in late 1944, was called what?

It was renamed simply The Vegan a year later, by which time it had 500 subscribers.

Which reference work was the first to publish the word 'vegan' independently, in 1962?

That was 18 years after the word was coined; the Oxford English Dictionary itself defines the term today with the 1944 origin.

The first vegan society in the United States was founded in 1948 in which state?

Catherine Nimmo and Rubin Abramowitz founded it, twelve years before the American Vegan Society appeared.

Who founded the American Vegan Society in 1960?

Dinshah ran the society from Malaga, New Jersey, for four decades and promoted the term 'ahimsa' as its guiding principle.

Which Romantic poet published 'A Vindication of Natural Diet' in 1813?

Shelley's wife Mary made the creature in Frankenstein shun meat too, five years later.

Who wrote 'Kitchen Philosophy for Vegetarians' (1849), regarded as the first vegan cookbook?

Nicholson was an American reformer who is better remembered for her eyewitness accounts of the Irish famine.

Leslie Cross founded which organisation in 1956, the seed of what became Plamil Foods?

By 1965 it was producing one of the first widely distributed soy milks in Britain.

The Economist declared which year 'the year of the vegan'?

That same year Burger King rolled out the Impossible Whopper nationwide and Beyond Meat went public.

The Herbivorous Butcher, described as America's first vegan butcher shop, opened in 2016 in which city?

It was beaten to the world-first title by The Vegetarian Butcher, which opened in the Netherlands in 2010.

Europe's first vegan supermarkets, Veganz and Vegilicious, opened in 2011 in which country?

Veganz started in Berlin and Vegilicious in Dortmund; Berlin has since become one of the most vegan-friendly cities in the world.

Which festival offered vegan dishes for the first time in its 200-year history in 2013?

The Munich beer festival is otherwise famous for roast chicken, pork knuckle and sausages.

In what year did the first Veganuary challenge take place?

By January 2021 more than 580,000 people from 209 countries and territories had signed up for it.

Veganuary, the pledge to eat vegan for January, was founded in which English city?

Participants sign up online and receive a starter kit and daily support emails for the month.

In January 2021, which restaurant became the first vegan restaurant in France to receive a Michelin star?

ONA stands for Origine Non Animale; 79 more vegan restaurants around the world earned stars that year.

Aquafaba, the egg-white substitute, is the leftover cooking water of which food?

It whips into a stable foam, so it can be used for meringues and mousses with no stabilisers at all.

The name 'aquafaba' was coined in 2015 from Latin words meaning what?

Goose Wohlt picked the name; the 'faba' part is also a nod to the legume family Fabaceae.

Impossible Foods was founded in 2011 by which Stanford biochemistry professor?

Brown took a sabbatical to work out how to replace animals in the food system and never went back.

The heme protein that makes an Impossible Burger 'bleed' is modelled on a molecule found naturally where?

Soy leghemoglobin is produced by genetically engineered yeast rather than harvested from plants.

Which New York restaurant, owned by David Chang, was the first to serve the Impossible Burger in July 2016?

Three years later Burger King put the Impossible Whopper on menus nationwide.

The primary protein in Beyond Meat products comes from which plant?

The pea protein is supplied by the French company Roquette Frères.

By roughly how much did Beyond Meat's share price surge on its first day of trading in May 2019?

It was the best-performing public offering by a major US company since 2000.

Beyond Meat's first product, sold at Whole Foods in 2012, imitated which meat?

The 'Chicken-Free Strips' came four years before the Beyond Burger patty in 2016.

Tempeh is a traditional fermented soybean food from which country?

It is native to Java, where it is a staple protein, and gets earthier in flavour as it ages.

What kind of organism binds soybeans into a cake of tempeh?

Rhizopus oligosporus or Rhizopus oryzae grows white threads through the beans and knits them together.

Seitan, the chewy meat substitute, is made from what?

Its oldest known description is in the Qimin Yaoshu, a Chinese agricultural encyclopedia from the year 535.

The word 'seitan' was coined in 1961 by George Ohsawa, an advocate of which diet?

In China the same food has been called mianjin, 'wheat tendon', since the sixth century.

What is the informal nickname for nutritional yeast?

It is a deactivated strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, sold as yellow flakes with a nutty, cheesy flavour.

When nutritional yeast contains vitamin B12, where does the vitamin come from?

Yeast cannot synthesise B12, so fortified brands add cyanocobalamin after production.

Isinglass, long used to clarify beer and wine, is made from what part of an animal?

It is a form of collagen, and its use in fining meant many traditional cask ales were not vegan.

The red food colouring carmine (E120) is made from which creature?

It shows up in yogurts, candy and lipstick, and the insects have been used for their red dye since around 700 BC.

Shellac, the glaze (E904) that gives some candies and apples their shine, is secreted by what?

The female insects live on trees in the forests of India and Thailand, and the resin is also used as a wood finish.

Gelatin, found in most gummy candy and marshmallows, is derived from what?

It comes from the skin, bones and connective tissue of cattle, pigs, chickens and fish; agar and pectin are the usual plant swaps.

What is the traditional coagulant used to set Chinese-style tofu?

Better known as gypsum; nigari, magnesium chloride from seawater, is the classic Japanese alternative.

Chinese legend credits the invention of tofu to which Han-dynasty prince?

Liu An of Anhui province lived from 179 to 122 BC; tofu did not appear on record in Japan until AD 965.

Jackfruit, the vegan stand-in for pulled pork, is the national fruit of which country?

It is also the largest tree-borne fruit, reaching 55 kg, and green jackfruit is sometimes sold as 'vegetable meat'.

Oat-milk brand Oatly was founded in 1994 in which country?

Rickard and Bjorn Oste built it on research from Lund University, and it listed on the Nasdaq as OTLY in 2021.

In 2025, which English city was home to the Vegan Society, the world's oldest vegan group?

It has run the sunflower Vegan Trademark on certified products since 1990 and is a registered charity.

JUST Egg, the pourable scrambled-egg substitute, is made from which legume?

Eat Just launched it in July 2017, three years after Unilever sued (and quickly dropped the suit) over its Just Mayo name.

Which country was first to approve the sale of cultivated (lab-grown) meat, in December 2020?

The product was Eat Just's GOOD Meat chicken, grown from cells rather than slaughtered.

Animal-rights group PETA, founded in 1980, is headquartered in which US city?

Its founding slogan holds that animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment or abuse.

The earliest record of soy milk is on a stone slab unearthed in China from which dynasty?

The first soy milk 'dairy' in the West was opened by Li Yuying in Colombes, France, in 1910.

Strict Jain vegetarians avoid potatoes, onions and garlic for what reason?

Jain doctrine holds root vegetables contain infinite nigoda organisms, so uprooting one causes far more harm than picking a fruit; honey is banned for the harm to bees.

Ital, the Rastafari plant-based diet, takes its name from which English word?

Dropping the first letter gives 'I-tal', echoing the Rastafari emphasis on 'I' as a marker of unity with the divine.

The 2011 documentary Forks Over Knives pairs nutrition researcher T. Colin Campbell with which surgeon?

Directed by Lee Fulkerson, the film argues that a whole-food, plant-based diet can prevent or reverse many chronic diseases.

Which actor executive-produced the 2015 Netflix cut of the documentary Cowspiracy?

The original 2014 film was crowdfunded on Indiegogo by 1,449 backers who put in $117,092.

James Wilks, who fronts the 2018 vegan-athlete documentary The Game Changers, competed in which sport?

The film's executive producers include James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan.

Vitamin B12, which vegans are most often told to supplement, is made naturally only by which organisms?

Neither plants nor animals can synthesise it; livestock get it from microbes in their gut or feed.

Which metal sits at the centre of the vitamin B12 molecule?

That is where the chemical name cobalamin comes from; iron is the metal at the heart of haemoglobin instead.

The man who coined 'vegan' gave up meat at 14 after watching which animal slaughtered on his uncle's farm?

He was born in Mexborough, Yorkshire, in 1910, was a lifelong pacifist and lived to 95.

Which 11th-century Arab poet who wrote 'I No Longer Steal From Nature' is among the earliest known vegans?

The Irish farmer Robert Cook (1646–1726) also shunned all animal products, refusing even wool and leather on biblical grounds.

The Vegetarian Butcher, the first known vegetarian butcher shop, opened in 2010 in which country?

America's first vegan butcher, the Herbivorous Butcher, followed in Minneapolis six years later.

Which two countries each have roughly one in eleven people following a vegan diet?

In most developed Western countries the figure is closer to 2 percent.

According to 2021 HappyCow data, which city had the most vegan restaurants per resident?

Ubud in Bali, Phuket, Tel Aviv and Lisbon rounded out the top five.

What flower appears on the British Vegan Society's certification logo?

PETA's bunny logo also certifies a product as vegan, whereas the Leaping Bunny only signals no animal testing.

A 2018 study found plant-only diets worldwide would cut agricultural land use by how much?

That is 3.1 billion hectares, an area the size of Africa, alongside a 28 percent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions.